


Stone Cold Soldier

by DesertScribe



Category: Firefly
Genre: Gen, Grief/Mourning, Post-Canon, Post-Serenity (2005)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-10
Updated: 2017-09-10
Packaged: 2018-12-23 07:27:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,125
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11985072
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DesertScribe/pseuds/DesertScribe
Summary: Missing scene set between when the Alliance soldiers stand down and the memorial service and repairs montage that came after.In the immediate aftermath of Wash's death, Mal and Zoe try to deal with their grief in their separate and not so separate ways.





	Stone Cold Soldier

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Karmageddon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Karmageddon/gifts).



There was no stopping the signal once it was out in the wild, splashed across thirty worlds of viewing public who would be sure to share it with everyone else in the system before the day was out, but that didn't mean Mal or his crew's work had ended with making that broadcast. There was still the matter of putting themselves back together as best they could and everything that entailed. The Alliance forces had picked up and left nearly as quickly as they had stormed in, barely even pretending to help with the cleanup first, which was typical of the Alliance. All they had done was collect all the Reaver bodies and bring them along on their way out the door, but that was obviously one last ditch effort at public relations spin control by way of hiding more of the evidence from any future investigators rather than just them being good neighbors.

Mal was fine with that though, more than fine. Less than an half an hour had passed between the mass of goons failing to get their requested kill order and the last of their ships (all of them far less shiny than they had been before their brush with the Reavers) breaking atmosphere for points unknown, and even that amount of time had been overstaying their welcome as far as Mal was concerned. Finally seeing the back of that lot meant that Mal could focus on more important things. 

Simon got everyone patched up back to functional levels in short order, which was quite the feat given the rough shape that they all had been in by the end of the battle, especially the man himself, but he really was a damn good doctor. After that, a whole different sort of triage began, this one for ship and crew as a whole instead of for individual bodies. Although, before they could start work on getting Serenity back in the sky, there was still one individual body that needed taking care of sooner rather than later: Wash.

Mal was only an occasional believer in the idea of 'if you want something done right, then do it yourself,' because as captain it was both his job and privilege to delegate tasks to other people. In this case, however, he knew this wasn't the kind of job to trust to Jayne, and it definitely wasn't the kind of job to force on any of his other crew members, especially not Zoë. That meant that, as much as he hated the idea, the only person left for the job was Captain Malcom Reynolds himself. As it turned out, though, Mal didn't do a good enough job of making sure that everyone else knew this.

He hadn't thought he had wasted any time in getting started, but by the time Mal made his reluctant way up to the cockpit to take stock of the damage, both mechanical and human, he discovered that someone had already been there before him. A still-warm portable plasma cutter sat on the floor along with several burnt-through sections of ugly Reaver harpoon, and Wash's ruined flight chair was empty. Mal did not need more than one guess to know who had done it, and he knew it was his own gorram fault for not being fast enough to get there and do it himself first. He spent another few moments silently cursing himself, gave a few orders to the rest of the crew concerning their next course of action, then manned up and went to locate his missing second in command and her dead husband.

"You didn't need to be the one to do this," Mal said a while later, without preamble, as he walked through the open door, because waiting for a polite minute of silence before jumping into a conversation would have just given his traitorous throat time to close up around any inadequate words of comfort he might have tried to come up with in the meantime. He had ended up needing to check three different cold storage rooms before he found the one that Zoë had turned into the morgue, and having tried and failed to think of anything more poignant or reassuring to say as he had been searching, he doubted that an extra minute would have done him any good in that regard anyway.

"Yes, I did," Zoë answered. She remained stock still, standing in the parade-rest position he had found her in and did not look up from staring down at the sheet-wrapped bundle, undoubtedly Wash, on the table in front of her. Mal didn't blame her; the sight was hard to ignore. Another somewhat less perfectly arranged bundle, Mr. Universe, sat on another table just beyond, yet another man dead on Mal's account.

"But I could have--"

"Maybe you could have," Zoë said, interrupting him, "but I wasn't about to let you."

Mal stepped closer and reached out to put a hand on her shoulder but thought better of it and dropped his hand back to his side without making contact. He and Zoë had never been ones to talk about feelings with each other, but Mal suddenly found himself wishing that he knew how to do more than dance around such subjects at arms' length. In his mind's eye, he could see that brief span of time right after Wash had been hit where she had looked like she was going to break right then and there before moments later snapping back to being the stone cold soldier that she always was in a crisis, and he couldn't rightly judge which of those two versions of herself she was leaning more towards now that the battle was over.

Quiet seconds slipped past unnoticed. Under other conditions, Mal would have considered it to be a companionable silence, but in this case he wasn't certain if Zoë might have forgotten he was there the instant he stopped talking.

"Zoë," Mal eventually began again, "I _should_ have--," only to be cut off once more.

"We're gonna have to agree to disagree on that one, Captain," Zoë said. She finally looked up and met his eyes. Her own eyes were puffy and bloodshot, but whatever tears she might have shed were already dried to salt, soon to be wiped away completely, never to be mentioned again. Her face was already hardening back into that of the stone cold soldier.

Mal could only begin to guess at whatever mortal hurt she was still feeling inside, but he suspected that picking at the fresh scab of it wouldn't help any right now. The stone cold soldier was just a façade. They both knew that it had always been a façade, but it was one that had so far been sturdy enough to somehow get them both through a war and everything that came after between then and now. Still, there were ways to help shore it up even further and maybe get them through the here and now and a while beyond.

"You could punch me in the face if it would make you feel any better," Mal offered, spur of the moment, because it seemed like a good idea at the time, and he tended to go with his gut with this kind of thing, even when it meant accepting a blow to the head. The answer he got was not the one that he had expected.

"With all due respect, sir," Zoë said, which they both knew always meant that no respect was due at all on account of having said or done something stupid, "I'm not gonna add to my woes by busting my knuckles on your face just to help ease your guilt, especially not so soon after the Doc got done patching me up from before."

Mal gaped at her in surprise. "That wasn't what I was aiming at, at all," he protested.

"Maybe not," Zoë said, giving him a disapproving look, "but it's definitely where you're shooting from."

Mal turned over her words in his mind, and gorram it, why did she have to be right?

"I didn't need yet another soldier under my command dying before he got to go home," Mal said at last, after a long while of trying to figure out to say something that wouldn't just cause more hurt where he hadn't meant to, something both right and true without getting too close to talking about feelings. In the process, that minute of silence had managed to elbow its way into the conversation after all.

"No, you didn't, but that's also not what you got," Zoë said. "Wash died in his home."

"Huh, yeah, you're right," Mal said. And just like that, some of the tension seemed to ease from Zoë's shoulders. He wouldn't have guessed that _this_ was what Zoë had needed to hear in order to take a step towards feeling better, but he was glad he had been able to find out and not just because it saved him a punch in the face. And now, maybe it was time to take his leave. "If you have everything in hand here, I'm gonna go see to those graves than need digging, just as soon as I find a shovel."

Zoë, who had already been turning away from him again, back to Wash, stopped and let out the low ghost of a laugh. "You expect us to wait around while you spend a month chipping away at solid rock with a shovel? You really are serious about looking for some penance, even if you won't admit as much."

"Of course not," Mal said, though the denial was only true because he hadn't exactly planned through the logistics of the deed far enough to reach that conclusion yet. However, now that he thought about it, he had a better idea. "I was going to make Jayne do it."

Zoë shook her head. "Seeing you manage that might almost be worth having to listen to all the complaining that came after," she said. "Almost."

"We could lock ourselves inside and turn off the external audio feeds," Mal suggested, only half jokingly.

"We could do that," Zoë said, then added, "or you could use the maintenance drones in the storage bay two doors further down the hall."

"Yes, that's also a possibility," Mal agreed. "Though maybe don't mention as much to Jayne until after he's been digging for ten or twenty minutes. It'll keep him busy while Kaylee uses that time to get the monuments set up all proper anyway." He resisted the urge to say that Wash probably would have liked it that way. From the look on Zoë's face, she was probably thinking it anyway.

Zoë huffed out another short laugh, seemingly against her will. "If you say so, sir," she said.

"I do say so," Mal said. He was about to leave when another thought struck him. "Are you good here? I mean, of course you aren't good here, Zoë, but if you really aren't, then you need to say." And that had come out even closer to gibberish than he had feared it might, but he had never been any good at talking about feelings even at the best of times, which this definitely wasn't.

"For now I can be as good as I have to be. Can't answer for a couple of weeks from now, though," Zoë admitted.

"A couple of weeks from now we can be anonymous visitors to any of a half dozen backwater moons," Mal promised, "getting drunk and starting fights in an Alliance bar until we can beat back some of the pain on acceptable targets."

"I can hold out 'til then if you can, sir."

"It's a deal," Mal said, and they shook on it.

"But when the time comes," Zoë added, "I can't promise that my fist won't find its way to your face in the heat of the moment."

"I'll be sure to pretend not to notice," Mal said with all the gravity the situation demanded. After all, he had made the offer and wasn't about to rescind it. He looked between Zoë and Wash and Mr. Universe again and sighed. They weren't any of them truly fixed yet, leastways not those who were still among the living, but it seemed like they were maybe moving in the right direction to get there eventually, more thanks to Zoë than to himself. It was all he could really ask for just then. "Now if you'll excuse me," Mal said, "I have some semi-unnecessary digging to supervise."

"Of course."

And with that, Mal slipped out of the room and left Zoë to have a few more quiet minutes to say her private goodbyes to her husband.

The End


End file.
